On Writing, Plants, Home, and War
Why Book Tours Don’t Sell Books (and why I do them anyway)
If you are very lucky, your publisher will organize one for you around the publication date of your book. Or maybe two. But: many publishers won’t. Not even the big ones. Why not? Because book tours don’t sell books. Unless, perhaps, you are very famous. And they are incredibly time consuming to organize.
So then, why do it?
Stuck in Nonfiction in the End Times
“Within the mansion of serious fiction, no one will speak of how the continents were created; nor will they refer to the passage of thousands of years: connections and events on this scale appear not just unlikely but also absurd within the delimited horizon of a novel—”
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement
So, for a biologist-writer, who reflexively looks to evolution each time she asks herself “why?”—is there a choice? Could I write a novel if my mind tends toward the “serious?”
Writing Residencies: Applying against all odds…
Drafting applications for writing residencies can feel like pulling dreams about the future from thin air. You are pondering your work-in-progress (instead of writing it), trying to figure out what it might be wanting from you NEXT YEAR: Where will it want you to be? With whom? For how long? When? And why? And how are you supposed to know all of that right now?